'Pilgrimage': Annie Leibovitz Visits Darwin, Woolf, and Emerson

By Maria Popova

Annie Leibovitz is one of today's most prolific and celebrated photographers, her lens having captured generations of cultural icons with equal parts admiration and humanity. Unlike her other volumes, her latest book, out now, features no celebrities, no luminaries, no models. Instead, Pilgrimage is Leibovitz's thoughtful meditation on how she can sustain her creativity in the face of adversity and make the most of her remaining time on Earth. The quest took her to such fascinating locales and pockets of cultural history as Charles Darwin's cottage in the English countryside, Virginia Woolf's writing table, Ralph Waldo Emerson's home, Ansel Adams's darkroom, Emily Dickinson's only surviving dress, and Freud's final couch.

The kernel of the idea came before Leibovitz's partner, the great Susan Sontag, died -- the two of them had planned to do a book of places that were important to them, which they meticulously compiled in lists. Years after Sontag's death, upon visiting Niagara Falls with her three young kids, Leibovitz decided to start her own list and do the book on her own.

From the beginning, when I was watching my children stand mesmerized over Niagara Falls, it was an exercise in renewal. It taught me to see again. --Annie Leibovitz

The darkroom in Ansel Adams's home in Carmel, California, now owned by Adams's son, Michael, and his wife, Jeanne, friends of Leibovitz

Emily Dickinson's only surviving dress at the Amherst Historical Society in Amherst, Massachusetts

Image courtesy of Annie Leibovitz via The New York Times

A glass negative of a multiple-lens portrait of Lincoln made on Feb. 9, 1864, by Anthony Berger at the Brady Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Image courtesy of Annie Leibovitz via The New York Times

Sigmund Freud's couch in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London

Virginia Woolf's bedroom in her country home, which is a few miles from Charleston, England

Image courtesy of Annie Leibovitz via The New York Times

A door in the adobe patio wall of Georgia O'Keefe's home in Abiquiu, New Mexico

Image courtesy of Annie Leibovitz via The New York Times

Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance warehouse in Yonkers, New York

Image courtesy of Annie Leibovitz via The New York Times

Dominique Browning paid Leibovitz a visit to chat about the book and has a lovely piece about it in the Times.

I needed to save myself. I needed to remind myself of what I like to do, what I can do. --Annie Leibovitz

An intimate catalog of cultural meta-iconography, Pilgrimage is as much a photographic feat of Leibovitz's characteristically epic proportion as it is a timeless cultural treasure chest full of mementos from the hotbed of 20th-century thought.